


the lover, the liar

by lufairchild



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: But an almost postmodern interest in truth and fiction, Dom/sub, Fantasy, Great Hiatus, M/M, Oh also a reference to whipping just fyi, Send in the historicism police!, Victorian masculinity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:42:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27104413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lufairchild/pseuds/lufairchild
Summary: John Watson is a liar.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 39





	the lover, the liar

**Author's Note:**

> Note: This fic is part of the Mystery Dissertation Project, an experimental Ph.D. dissertation that combines academic writing, a mystery novel, and fanfiction. The fic you'll find posted under this username is (supposedly) by one of the characters in the mystery novel, Lu Fairchild; it explores questions of consent, vulnerability, desire, and the complicated relationship between what we read and write and what we actually want and/or approve of in real life. If you're interested in learning more about the Mystery Dissertation Project, check out its [website.](https://mysterydissertationproject.home.blog) Any questions and feedback are more than welcome!

John Watson is a liar.

All writers, you may say, are liars: a fair objection. You may also point out that he himself has acknowledged this fact, going so far as to include my own criticisms of his work—that he romanticizes where he should be objective and obscures where he should inform—in the stories he publishes about me for the world to read. But as I sit here in our shared abode, taking pen to paper myself, I contend that what I am writing now—what I am about to write—is far less of a lie than his mangled tales. For I am about to tell the truth: the glorious, dangerous, wicked and wonderful truth.

John Watson is my lover.

There it is. The secret he hides behind yellow faces and cunning contraltos, an antisocial detective and sweet Mary Morstan. That Watson is in reality no more married than I.

Or perhaps, just as much married as I.

Shall I tell you another truth? One which an ex-army doctor with an unimpeachable reputation of honor and decency and manly courage does not wish the world to know?

I like to have him on his knees, and he likes to be there.

John Watson is a man who wants to be mastered. He is quite good and very brave and excellent to have at one’s back in a spot of danger, but he is neither a leader nor a maverick and he requires a certain impetus to stumble forward into an honest existence, into the wide open world that lies beneath and in back of our own.

Now who is the romantic, I wonder? Readers of my friend’s stories would be shocked to hear me speak so poetically. Watson himself would be shocked. Sometimes he is too quick to believe his own fictions.

So it is my task to remind him of the way things really are.

I like it best after a case. When the villains have been put to justice, the threads untangled, the chase concluded or the stakeout ended or the loved ones reunited, and Watson and I are back in Baker Street and he is looking at me from his armchair as if I have just plucked the sun and the moon from the sky and juggled them like some celestial conjurer. I can see him there now, his broad browned face heavy with admiration and desire and need.

At such times, I rise to stand before him and run my hand over his cheek, the stubble on his chin, the tendons of his neck. His eyes flutter shut as I slip my thumb into his mouth.

“Holmes,” he says, always with a note of surprise and faint protest, as if this is new, as if things like the time of day and the place and the world’s opinions still matter. As if he is still unable to wholly acknowledge the reality of what we do, what we are.

Or maybe he does it on purpose, so that I will prove it to him again.

“Into the bedroom, Watson,” I say, or, “Remove all your clothes, this instant,” or simply, “On your knees.” If he were here now—or if I were home, in our shared quarters at 221B Baker Street rather than in disguise on the continent seeking out every last one of Professor Moriarty’s associates so I may safely return home to my lover—I would not be so gentle: for he has just informed the world that his wife is a lighthouse for people in need and I have never been steady enough to steer ships away from the rocks, only to clean them up after they have been dashed to pieces. I want him to remember that he is a liar, that however solid his reasons he lies with every word in every tale and I am Sherlock Holmes and my business is truth.

“I am going to show you to whom you belong,” I would whisper in his ear, and he would tremble and I would pull him roughly to his feet and strip him of his trousers, his smallclothes, until he was bare from the waist down, already hard and wanting. I would push him onto his hands and knees on the carpet—he would gasp and flush, still collected enough to be embarrassed—a state which I would be determined to demolish. I would put my hand on his bare arse. His knees and wrists would start to wobble.

“You would let me do anything to you, Watson,” I would say softly. “Anything at all. Wouldn’t you?”

He would swallow his reply. I would sit in the chair just behind him and open my legs, pulling him back against my still-clothed hardness.

“If I wanted to spend myself all over your back,” I would say calmly, “would you allow it?”

He would let out a gasp, a choking sort of moan, and I would have to slap him lightly before he would answer.

“Yes,” he would admit.

“If I wanted to slip my fingers inside you and move them ever so slowly, until you were begging for more, and I did not give you more, and I forbid you to touch yourself, and I kept at it until you did not know your own name, would you let me?”

“Yes,” he would gasp out.

“And if I wanted to take my riding crop to your tender, naked skin,” I would say viciously, slapping him harder this time, “for allowing the world to believe you are possessed by some soft, tissue-paper wife instead of on your knees every night pleading for me to fuck you, how would that sound, Watson?”

He would moan and writhe and he would say—I know this as an absolute certainty—he would say, “Please. Please do it.”

And I would.

And when I was inside him and on top of him and all around him I would ask him who he belonged to and he would finally, in a voice broken and spent and free of shame and artifice, tell the truth.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading, all! I've really never gotten over the legendary katie forsythe's h/w fic and its attachment to top!holmes. in a lot of ways perhaps this is a sort of homage: I bow down before you, katie/wordstrings. - lu


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